9 All Important Questions: Answered For You

There are things you should ask every service provider you consider. Here are few of these and our answers to them.

1. How long has Business IT been around?

Business IT was founded by Mark and Amber Howard in 2003. Since then the business has grown and evolved to accommodate changing client requirements and new developments in the technology space.

We are really happy and proud that many of the partners that on boarded in these early days of our business are still with us.

2. Who is our typical client?

We specialise in providing solutions and technology services to businesses from a range of industries – professional services (accountancy, law, advisory services practices), construction, health, hospitality, NGOs... Most of them have their HQ in Christchurch or Canterbury but some of their staff are spread across New Zealand and Australia, work remotely or work on the go, using mobile workstations.

Typically, our clients have at least 10 end users or workstations and we offer them a comprehensive list of standartised solutions aiming to cover all their technology requirements.

3. Does our company depend on one client for large share of your revenue?

Business IT is well diversified with our revenue being derived from providing services to over 80 companies from various sectors of the economy with none of them being crucial for our company’s survival.

4. Who will be the actual person working with my team?

The short answer is - the most qualified person for the job. And we know that the last thing you want to hear from your technician when they walk in the door is “where is the server?”

We have our processes set up and we run and very comprehensive documentation system to record and share information to ensure that any of our staff who visit you on site will be familiar with all the aspects of your network with all the details they need, literary, at the tips of their fingers.

We place high value to providing consistent and traction-free service to you.

5. What kind of qualifications do our team have?

One of the advantages of signing up for managed technology service is that through our experienced network administrators you have access to more expertise than you can afford to employ in-house.

We employ highly qualified technicians both in terms of training and “field experience”. Our hiring is closely aligned with the workload we are committed to and the specific knowledge required to maintain all the systems and networks we take upon to manage. We can provide more details upon request.

We have also developed multiple partnerships to extend our exposure to solutions are not often employed or issues that rare at this stage in New Zealand. This provides our end customers with the best possible outcomes.

6. What is our customer retention rate over the last 7 years?

As mentioned before, some of our early clients are still with us, and 58.3% of current managed clients have been with us for more than five years.

We are also proud to say we still provide IT services and solutions to some of the clients we have signed in the first couple of years of starting our operations.

7. How much of our Time goes towards preventing problems before they happen, versus fixing them after they occur?

It is in our own best interest to allocate a significant amount of your service time to monitoring and preventing issues and aligning your network with industry standards as reactive work is costly to us and difficult to budget for you, but is part of our managed services agreement.

This is why we aim to have processes aligned and up to speed as soon as possible after on boarding you. Typically, once integrated into our system we would spend about 70-80% of our time on proactive tasks and consultancy.

8. What happens if we decide that we are not good fit together and need to part ways?

If this happens, we will hand over all your documentation to your staff and we will be available to assists with the migration and we guarantee you will experience the same exceptional customer service, you did when onboarding.

We aim to deliver high quality, reliable service with integrity to all our clients and we have a proven track record doing just that. However, we know that businesses may need to change direction quickly and we will support you fully to achieve your desired outcome.

9. What is the worst disaster that you have faced with one of your clients in the past year or so?

We have recently had a situation where ransomware had cut off our client’s access to their own servers and operational data and applications. They were one of our fully managed clients and we had in place a very detailed backup and data protection strategy, and we had disaster recovery plans in place which allowed us to get them up and running in a very short time with minimal disruption and loss of productivity. And before the stress levels were up to critical levels.